Magnus propelled himself at the hooded figure like a cannonball, crashing into him and knocking him to the ground. However, the sorcerer somehow retained a grip on the staff. Magnus tried to wrestle it away from him, but the hooded figure, though caught by surprise, was strong enough to hold on. As their tug-of-war continued, the hieroglyphs on the staff flashed on and off like lightbulbs getting ready to die.
The falcon, recovered from its trip through the vortex, rose into the air, then turned and dived at Magnus. Evidently, the trip through the vortex had disrupted his invisibility, which probably meant Eva wasn’t invisible anymore, either. Trying not to think too much about how much danger she was in, Eva pulled her sword and ran in Magnus’s direction.
“Stay back!” he yelled as the falcon tried to dig its talons into his scalp. There was no way he could handle the bird and the hooded stranger at the same time, so Eva ignored him.
She’d never used a sword before, but the blade seemed to have a mind of its own—or at least a good way of reading hers. She focused on the falcon, which continued to claw at Magnus and ignore her. The sword swung, taking the bird’s head off with one stroke. Its lifeless body thudded to the ground next to Magnus.
As the men struggled, the glow from the staff grew brighter and brighter, but the light still flickered as their two wills clashed within the ancient wood. Eva had a hard time looking at it. A sense of wrongness bombarded her senses. She wanted to run but didn’t want to abandon Magnus. It was also hard to forget that she was somewhere in the Egyptian desert with no obvious way to return home.
“Stay back!” commanded Magnus. “Be ready to run if he gets control of the staff.” He sounded out of breath, but he was still struggling with all his might.
Eva didn’t fall back. She didn’t move forward, either. She knew it made sense to plunge her sword into the hooded figure, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that.
The back of her neck tingled, and she turned to see why. Another hooded figure was skulking up behind her, his footsteps barely audible as he crept across the sand.
She raised the sword, which flashed dimly in the moonlight. The new stranger raised a hand, spoke in what might have been ancient Egyptian—it was certainly no language Eva recognized—and she felt her muscles freeze. In seconds, she became as rigid as the statue of Saint Brigid back in Santa Brígida.
Passing by her as if she were of no importance, her attacker moved toward Magnus and raised his hands. Eva did not have to be an expert to realize that he was readying himself to attack Magnus with magic. She wanted to cry out but couldn’t.
How could she have been overcome so quickly? Magnus had said that the sword offered some protection against magic. Should she have been paralyzed so easily? Perhaps the spell’s grip was not total.
Focusing on the sword, Eva felt her fingers loosen. Apparently, she needed to be thinking about the sword to invoke its protection. In a moment, her body felt stiff but movable.
Magnus must have noticed the approach of a second sorcerer. From the way that sorcerer dodged, Magnus had probably flung some kind of magic his way. Unfortunately, his attempt to multitask gave the sorcerer he was grappling with just enough of an advantage to pull the staff away momentarily. A flash of light blinded Magnus, but Eva, still thinking about the protection given to her by the sword, could see enough to realized that the first sorcerer had shoved Magnus off of him and gotten up.
“Surrender now, and I will spare your lives,” said the first sorcerer in a booming voice Eva suspected was somehow magically enhanced.
Magnus staggered to his feet, but with a wave of the staff, the first sorcerer conjured a wind that threw him back to the ground.
“Opposing us is pointless, for our magic together is more formidable than yours, and with the staff, our efforts are like an elephant, and yours are like an ant.”
Both sorcerers seemed focused on Magnus, which gave Eva a chance to stumble awkwardly toward the one closest to her, coming up behind him as fast as she could. Her arms were too stiff to be of much use, but again the sword knew what to do. It pulled her arm around in front of the sorcerer and thrust it up against his throat.
“Drop the staff, or I will cut your friend’s throat.” Eva’s voice sounded scratchy and unconvincing even to her, but the sorcerer whose back she was now pressed against stiffened.
“Dare to shed his blood, and I shall summon jackals to rip your flesh from your bones,” said the other sorcerer. “Your puny sword will be of little use to you then.”
“You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” said Magnus. “You may defeat us for a time, but we will rise again and again, until your flesh has decayed and your bones have turned to dust.”
The first sorcerer pulled back his hood to reveal the face of a surprisingly young Egyptian. He might have been handsome if his expression had not been so hard, his eyes so filled with hatred. “No, it is you who do not know who you’re dealing with. As you speak of rising again, I will assume you are aware of reincarnation, and if so, know then that my friend and I have risen time and again already. In previous lives, I was Iahmesu, and he was Ptahhoptep, chief sorcerers in the court of the Pharaoh thousands of years ago. We are the ones called Jannes and Jambres in your Bible.”
Magnus made a show of staggering around as if he were still blind, but he managed to wink in Eva’s direction. His seemingly aimless wandering was gradually bringing him closer to her.
“If I’m not mistaken, didn’t Moses kick your asses? Why would that impress me?” Iahmesu raised the staff as if to blast Magnus into dust, but at the last minute, he let it fall to his side and laughed.
“That was long ago. We have learned much since. More to the point, I’m holding the staff of the gods. Moses himself could not have prevailed against it.”
“So you say, but there’s no way to put that to the test,” said Magnus.
“Brave words from someone so easily blinded by the light of Ra.”
“Brave words from someone who was once Taliesin in the land of the summer stars. I was with God before Lucifer fell and shall be with him again on the Day of Judgement. I have known Achilles and Alexander, Moses and David, Arthur and Merlin. I saw the fall of Troy, the rise of Rome, the birth and the crucifixion of Jesus.”
The tone was so utterly unlike Magnus’s usual voice that Eva almost wanted to look around for someone else. As bluffs went, it the biggest one she’d ever seen.
Aside from her holding a sword against the throat of a man she could never kill.
Despite the authoritative tone of his bragging, Magnus was still feigning blindness. He had stumbled so close to Eva that she could have reached out and taken his hand.
Iahmesu laughed again and said, “Amun, god of all that is hidden, will reveal the truth.” He raised the staff again and flashed another light on Magnus. Though brilliant, it was not blinding, but Magnus looked like a shadow in the power of its light.
“Ha! You aren’t the Taliesin of whom you speak, but merely a bad copy, a creature forged from dark magic. If your God exists at all, you weren’t with him in the beginning, and you won’t be with him at the end. More than likely, he abhors you as an abomination.”
Magnus jumped back as if struck, then fell to the ground.
“Whatever he is, a sword is still a sword,” said Eva. “And it’s still at your friend’s throat.” Wincing, she made the tiniest cut she could. Blood trickled down the blade and fell drop by drop into the sand.
Iahmesu scowled and raised the staff. Eva saw its glow brighten just in time to close her eyes against the blast of sunlight he unleashed. From the way Ptahhotep yelled, he had not been as careful and was now temporarily blinded. Iahmesu yelled himself, and when Eva opened her eyes, he was staggering backward, his eyes staring sightlessly in her general direction.
The sword! She had seen how brightly it flashed in the sun. It must have reflected enough light back at Iahmesu to blind him with his own spell.
Magnus, who must have closed his eyes as fast as Eva had, wasted no time exploiting the Egyptian’s error. He jerked his arms upward abruptly, throwing fistfuls of sand into the air, caught them with his magic, and spread them out in front of him like a wall. Even when Iahmesu’s eyes recovered, he would not have a clear view of Eva or Magnus.
Moving so fast he must have been propelling himself by magic, Magnus punched Ptahhotep in the face. As the sorcerer slumped, Eva pulled away the blade to avoid accidentally slitting his throat. Magnus threw him into the sand and let it billow over him, creating a small mound that from a distance would look no different from any pile of sand. A few more hand gestures, and he looked exactly like Ptahhotep. Two more quick moves, and he created a convincing illusion of himself.
Despite all the illusions, Magnus looked tired. He’d burned through a lot of magic flying, and Eva could tell from the strained look and the sweat on his disguised face that generating illusions so rapidly was no small task. Could he keep going long enough to fool Iahmesu?
The barrier he had raised shuddered as what looked like a full-scale sandstorm struck it. It crumbled back into the sand from which it came, and Magnus’s double began running away. Iahmesu, evidently able to see again laughed even more loudly than before.
“Coward! May the power of Min strike you down!”
The hieroglyphs on the staff turned electric blue, and lightning flashed from it, arcing across the desert until it struck Magnus’s double, who screamed so realistically that Eva shuddered. He fell into the sand, and she could swear she smelled burned flesh. Magnus knew how to weave a convincing illusion.
“Surrender to him as soon as you can without arousing suspicion,” whispered Magnus. “He’ll kill you rather than let you win. I have a plan.”
That he had a plan was obvious. Whether or not it would work was an entirely different question. Magnus was shaking slightly. On the other hand, Iahmesu, smiling triumphantly, showed no sign of nearing the end of his strength.
“Lower your sword, and I might spare your life,” said Iahmesu.
Eva dropped the sword from Magnus’s throat. Pretending to be Ptahhotep, he turned to face her and grabbed the blade from her.
“Stay behind me.” He mouthed the words rather than saying them aloud. He also made some quick hand gestures Iahmesu couldn’t see. Eva felt warmth around her. “Extra protection,” he mouthed.
“Follow me,” said Magnus hoarsely. He turned and marched in Iahmesu’s direction. Eva walked a couple of steps behind him.
“Ptahhotep, what’s wrong with your voice?” asked Iahmesu.
“Sand,” rasped Magnus. He quickened his pace.
Iahmesu frowned, raised the staff, and struck Magnus with the same kind of revealing light he had before. The frown deepened.
“Stop! I’m having trouble telling who you are.”
“It’s the sword,” said Magnus, who kept moving toward Iahmesu. “I can feel some kind of protection against magic. What does it matter, though? Who else could I be?”
“Stop, or I will strike you down where you stand!” yelled Iahmesu, aiming the staff at Magnus. The hieroglyphs flared angrily. “Drop the blade!”
“Drop?” asked Magnus. The way he said it made Eva realize it was an instruction. She hit the ground as fast as she could. Magnus charged with speed driven by his magic.
“Taste the wrath of Set!” yelled Iahmesu, and another sandstorm rose up with no warning. Magnus didn’t slow his charge. From what little Eva could tell, the sword blocked part of the force of the storm. He disappeared into the sand-filled winds. A moment later, Iahmesu shot through the top of the storm and hovered in the air.
“I can ride the winds of Amun, false one. Can you say the same?”
“Yeah, pretty much!” yelled Magnus as he, too rose above the sandstorm.
Iahmesu blasted him with lightning, which Magnus dodged. From where Eva lay, though it looked as if the bolts came dangerously close to striking him.
Iahmesu kept firing, but he also kept rising to avoid Magnus’s attempts to dart in his direction.
Was Magnus trying to get him to exhaust the magic of the staff? If so, that seemed a losing strategy. Even from a distance, Eva could hear a tremor in Magnus’s voice. He was no longer trying to camouflage his voice with fake hoarseness, and he’d dropped the Ptahhotep illusion, revealing skin that looked too pale.
She longed to do something to help, but what could she do? She didn’t have the sword now, and even if she did, she doubted throwing it toward Iahmesu would do much.
Ptahhotep was buried under the sand somewhere nearby. The fact that he wasn’t moving suggested he was still unconscious. Could she use his helplessness to her advantage? It might be worth a try.
At least it would be if she had any clue where he was. Staring at an undifferentiated mass of sand without any obvious reference points, she was stumped.
She had to try, though. Magnus took a direct lightning hit. Whatever protection the sword and his own magic could provide held—just barely. He cried out and plunged back into the sandstorm. That might have been a trick to lure Iahmesu back down, but the cry vibrated with real pain. She was sure of it.
Ptahhotep had to be pretty close to the surface. Eva dug in several places, near where she thought she had been standing. Between the darkness and the lack of landmarks, she could be completely wrong, but she kept going. The sand scraped at her hands and broke her fingernails. She would have given anything for a shovel.
Iahmesu descended back into the sandstorm. Since he had conjured it up, it apparently couldn’t hurt him, but she imagined Magnus taking a real beating in it.
Her fingers touched something softer than the sand. Ptahhotep!
He was still unconscious, just as she had suspected. There was a little air pocket around his face—Magnus’s attempt to keep him from suffocating. It made digging his head free very easy. It was harder to find something solid enough to threaten him with, but she managed to unearth a piece of rock about the size of two fists.
“Surrender, or I will kill your friend!” She yelled as loudly as she could, but she wasn’t sure whether Iahmesu could hear her over the roaring winds of the sandstorm.
At first, she got no response. Just when desperation tempted her to start throwing rocks into the sandstorm, Iahmesu emerged—clutching the staff in one hand and a bloody and battered Magnus in the other.
“Drop the stone, or I will fry you with the wrath of Ra!” yelled Iahmesu, pointing the staff at her.
“I’m protected against your magic,” she yelled back. “By the time you could hurt me enough to make me stop, I would already have pounded his head into a bloody pulp.”
The supposedly unconscious Magnus risked raising his head enough to look at her and gestured for her to drop the stone. That left Eva in a horrible dilemma.
He clearly had a plan, but she had no idea what it was. Perhaps he was playing possum to catch Iahmesu by surprise. But if there were the case, wouldn’t he have more of a chance if she kept the sorcerer’s attention focused on her?
On the other hand, she knew Magnus had placed some protection on her but had no idea how strong it was. Could the staff take her down in one blast? Even without any experience in magic, she could feel the power of the staff as Iahmesu aimed it at her. If anything, it felt stronger than ever, mighty enough to blast her, and with enough energy left over to dig far into the sand beneath her feet.
Magnus didn’t have the sword anymore. He must have dropped it to sell the idea that he was unconscious. That meant it would be in the relatively small area where the sandstorm still raged.
Instead of carrying out her threat to brain Ptahhotep—which had just been another bluff, anyway—Eva ran toward the storm. Iahmesu, not expecting that move, succeeded only in melting the sand where she had just been standing.
Based on the way Iahmesu followed Magnus into the storm, Eva figured he couldn’t see her once she was engulfed by the sand, so she ran as hard and as fast as he could in that direction. Iahmesu, encumbered by Magnus, shot again and missed.
She made it into the storm but had to close her eyes to keep from getting sand into them. She couldn’t have seen anything, anyway. A particle mask would have been nice, but she didn’t have one, so she tied the scarf she’d been wearing around her neck over her nose and mouth. Then, her eyes closed against the sand, she crouched and felt around for the sword.
The storm had moved enough sand around to bury the blade, but it couldn’t be hidden that deeply in such a short time. Her hands were already scraped and scratched from digging, but she abused them more, pawing at the sand until they were numb.
The storm became less intense. Perhaps Iahmesu realized that it would be easier to find her without it. If so, she didn’t have long.
Just as the storm was dying down completely, her hand touched cold metal. Pulling the sword loose was easy enough, but in seconds Iahmesu would be able to see her.
Magnus wasn’t the only one who could play possum. Eva fell to the ground with her body covering the sword. From a distance, Iahmesu might think she was unconscious.
She heard a small thud as the sorcerer’s feet touched the ground, followed by a louder one that must have been him dumping Magnus.
Iahmesu chuckled to himself, sure of his victory. His footsteps sounded as if he were moving toward her. Then he cried out, and Eva could hear the sounds of a struggle. Magnus had made his move.
Eva intended to leap up, sword in hand and turn to threaten Iahmesu, but her muscles were stiff and her movements slow. By the time she got up, he and Magnus were once again involved in a tug-of-war for the staff.
Despite Iahmesu having been caught by surprise, he seemed to have the upper hand. The hieroglyphs were blazing, and the sorcerer seemed to be getting stronger as if drawing power from it. Looking more closely, she could see power hugging the staff like an extra layer. It allowed Iahmesu to touch it but drove Magnus’s fingers just far enough from the staff himself to prevent him from opposing whatever Iahmesu was doing.
“I don’t want to kill him, but I want to break his grip on the staff,” Eva whispered to the sword as it twitched in her hand, eager for battle. As before, she felt it moving and followed along.
Iahmesu was so focused on Magnus that he didn’t even see the blade coming. The sword rose and fell, slicing through his right hand and lopping off three of his fingers. Horrified, Eva held the blade back from striking again. Iahmesu screamed, and the glowing shell around the staff sparked and died. Magnus pulled with all his strength, and he wrenched the bloody staff from the hand of the wounded sorcerer. Iahmesu, holding his maimed hand, tried to stumble in Magnus’s direction, but Magnus drew a blinding flash from the staff, and his foe fell back, howling.
“I…I.” Eva couldn’t find words to articulate her horror at what she’d done. Magnus looked at her and smiled.
“It’s all right. You only did what you had to. Iahmesu would have killed us both given half a chance.”
Turning back to Iahmesu, he raised the staff and said, “In the name of Khonsu, sleep.” The staff flashed moonlight, and Iahmesu slumped over, unconscious.
“I’m going to need to do something about Iahmesu and Ptahhotep to keep them from coming after us. I assume you want them kept alive.”
Eva nodded. She found herself staring at the pool of blood next to Iahmesu’s ruined hand.
“I can fix that for you,” said Magnus as if he were changing a lightbulb or replacing a washer in the sink. “I just need to raise some healing power. Let’s see. The power of Isis is probably best for severed body parts. After all, in Egyptian myth, she had to put her dismembered husband together like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Magnus invoked Isis, and the staff glowed warmly in his hands. He took his right hand off of it, bent down, and meticulously put each finger back in place. The severed digits fused with the rest of the hand. There was no sign of a scar when Magnus finished.
He walked over to Eva and patted her on the shoulder. “See, no harm done.”
“That’s…amazing,” said Eva.
Magnus bowed as if responding to applause. “Really, that part was mostly the staff. I’ve studied Lady of the Lake healing techniques, but Tal’s better at them than I am.
“Now, all I need to do is wipe their memories, and we can be on our way.”
“You’re going to give them total amnesia and just leave them in the middle of the desert?” asked Eva.
“They deserve far worse than that,” said Magnus. “But no, I’ll just wipe away any knowledge of magic and the staff—and any recollection of us. Despite how desolate this area looks, there’s actually a town nearby. They’ll be fine.”
Magnus invoked the power of Thoth, and hieroglyphs appeared in the air. Eva watched as they faded one by one.
“The memory work I could have done myself, but when I’m this tired, it’s easier to let the staff do it.”
Looking more closely, Eva could see just how tired Magnus was—exhausted would have been a better description. It was amazing he was still standing.
“How…how are we going to get back?” asked Eva.
Magnus chuckled. “I look that bad, huh? Given a few minutes, I’m sure I can—wait, your hands are bleeding.”
Eva looked down at the scraped mess. She had forgotten all about it.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t notice,” said Magnus, lifting her hands to examine them more closely. “With the staff, that’s another quick fix.”
Magnus let go of her hands, raised the ancient relic again, and invoked the power of Hathor. “The best choice for healing beautiful women,” he said and winked. Her hands tingled, and when she looked down at them, they were as good as new. Even her torn fingernails had been restored.
If only her previous state of mind could be restored so easily!